Mohammed Wardi

Musicians in exile know all too well about the power and longing of their art form, its ability to celebrate and signify culture. Personal belongings and property may carry reminders of a home or a family left behind, but nothing is quite as potent, or as mysterious, as music. As thin as air and as deep as blood, music carries messages of human passion and cultural identity in ways that politics can’t touch.

Such is certainly the case with Mohammed Wardi, the revered Nubian, Sudanese singer and songwriter whose imprint on African music is indelible. Political unrest and oppression in his native country forced him to flee, but music remains a central part of his being, and a force for healing. The man who has been called “the ambassador of the Arabic song to Africa’’ continues to promote the culture of his homeland, even as the current regime has made him one of the country’s most famous refugees.

Wardi’s expressive voice soars with graceful inflections and nuances. He sings songs of love, and of the fight for freedom, with a limber style that reflects African and Middle Eastern influences, as well as the western flavor of such American heroes as Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. His musical language is unique, and also multi-faceted in direction, an idealistic merger of Arabic and African, with touches of the rhythmic pulse of reggae (Wardi was a friend of, and influence on, Bob Marley) and calypso.

His vocal art is world music, made with an embracing, border-crossing heart. Which is one of the reasons that Wardi enjoys a popularity that radiates outward from the heartland of Sudan, into West Africa, to the Berber terrain in North Africa, and other points on the continent, having sold 20 million records in his career thus far. Increasingly, his influence is venturing further around the world, despite the efforts of the Sudanese government to banish his art and destroy his existing recordings.

In this aesthetic melting pot, elements from the African and Arabic worlds meet, as well as arrangements for strings and horns, rhythm section, and Wardi’s own soulful delivery of songs dating back to 1958’s “Yanaseena.” Diversity through unity is the guiding principle.
Wardi often subjects his songs to extended improvisational forms, surrendering to spontaneous impulses both in terms of his vocal treatments and song structures.

Hamza El Din, the Nubian musician who has gained considerable acclaim in the west over the last few decades, speaks with great respect for his fellow artist: “Wardi has not only been popular outside our home country, the Sudan, but as a monumental composer and singer, he is a true fountain of inspiration for young African singers.”

In fact, the famed singer, whose musical career officially began in 1959, gained early humanistic insight by starting out professional life as a teacher. He was born Mohammed Osman Wardi in 1932, on Sawarda, an island in the Nile close to Northern Sudan, where he returned to teach, after growing up in Egypt. As he traveled to different parts of Northern and Central Sudan in his teaching position, Wardi gained understanding of Sudan’s rich variety.

Moving to Khartoum in 1957, Wardi embarked a career as a singer, releasing his first album that year. In addition to his singing, Wardi is a masterful performer on the Oud (lute) and the traditional Nubian instrument, the Tambour (Kithara), an instrument created in his family lineage.

Through the years, Wardi has maintained a flexible musical attitude, blending elements from around the region and the world, and appealing to successive generations of listeners. Wardi has expressed his fierce opposition to tyranny and oppression in his country, through the power of song.
That very power landed him in jail, first in 1961, and then for two years in 1973. On the eve of another imprisonment, in 1983, his supporters smuggled Wardi out of the country.

Wardi’s poetic example and outspoken views have attracted a loyal following in the region, from the beginning of his career 40 years ago, to today. At a 1990 concert at the Itang refugee camp in Ethiopia, he enthralled a huge crowd of Sudanese refugees, estranged from their civil war-torn country. A 1994 concert in Addis Ababa had to be held in a football stadium to accommodate the audience.

Wardi maintains a justifiable pride in his ensemble, the African Birds, drawn from the finest ranks of Sudanese musicians. The fact that most of them have been exiled underscores the mission beyond the notes. As Wardi explains, “these Sudanese musicians and singers are working in the struggle to bring democracy back to Sudan. They deserve to be shown and written about, because all of them are political refugees. I would like to show the American media, which displays all the wars and the famine and all the difficult things, that there is cultural life, too.”